Development of an Autonomous Mobile Towing Vehicle for Logistic Tasks
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abstract
Frequently carrying high loads and performing repetitive
tasks compromises the ergonomics of individuals, a recurrent scenario
in hospital environments. In this paper, we design a logistic planner of
a fleet of autonomous mobile robots for the automation of transporting
trolleys around the hospital, which is independent of the space configuration,
and robust to loss of network and deadlocks. Our robotic solution
has an innovative gripping system capable of grasping and pulling nonmodified
standard trolleys just by coupling a plate. Robots are able to
navigate autonomously, to avoid obstacles assuring the safety of operators,
to identify and dock a trolley, to access charging stations and
elevators, and to communicate with the latter. An interface was built
allowing users to command the robots through a web server. It is shown
how the proposed methodology behaves in experiments conducted at the
Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porta and Braga's Hospital.
This work is financed by the ERDF - European Regional
Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation-
COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the Portuguese
funding agency, FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project
SAICTPAC/0034/2015 - POCI-01- 0145-FEDER-016418.
Authors would like to acknowledge to Trivalor, Itau and Gertal for the support of
the project RDH.
